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Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
For a bit of maybe context, she was a paleontologist...but
Friend of mine from university was always ready to scoop up roadkill into her trunk when she passed it by so that she could render it down to the bones so she would have a skeleton to study/draw.
I don't know that this even counts, but one of the most strange but wildly interesting things I used to do years back was randomly exploring defunct teleporters in Habbo Hotel.
For those who don't know about teleporters/teles in Habbo Hotel, there are probably tens of thousands of pairs of teleports that exist in the game, each of them connecting only to its pair. Since trading furniture is pretty much a currency in Habbo, a lot of individual teleporters get traded off or lost throughout the years, and often end up being parked in random rooms and vast furniture junkyards.
So I would often lay down several random teles from my inventory, or enter my own furniture junkyard, and try every tele in there until I got a live one. This would Bill & Ted me to fuck knows where. If I'm unlucky, it's just a dead end room. If I'm lucky, it's a room with even more teles. That's where the rabbit hole begins. Pretty soon you're ten teles deep into the weirdest, most liminal Back Rooms spaces you can imagine. Sometimes you even find a back door into other players' private rooms and get to explore like a cat burglar. The sky was the limit.
I haven't logged in for a decade or more, but I still miss doing that sometimes.
I included the best pic I could find online of what a tele goldmine looked like, except there would typically be a wide variety of styles and not all portapotties like these.
Holy shit, this sounds like an absolute blast!
I’d watch this YouTube channel
There is/was this guy who would make really intricate linoleum tiles with meticulously cut out texts describing his delusional ideas about conspiracies around resurrecting dead people. It's seriously wild stuff.
He made it his life's mission to spread this idea by distributing those tiles across a large area around Philadelphia but eventually covering a large part of the east coast. He covered the back of the tiles in tar and found an ingenious way of depositing them on busy roads, where other cars would then drive over them and firmly imbed them in the asphalt.
While that in and of itself would probably be classified more as a mental illness than a hobby, it did sprout a community of people who went to spot these tiles on the streets to document and map them. It is also believed that some copycats have emerged over the years.
There's an amazing documentary about it called "Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles". I highly recommend it.
If there's one thing I learned from being a siren enthusiast, it's that if it exists, there's a community and hobby formed around it. Neurodivergence is a helluva drug.
Quick! You can only take 3 sirens to a deserted island with you, which three do you choose!?
BNCO Mobil Directo (variant with a Wisconsin gas engine), a Federal Signal model 500-SHTT, and a B&M 20-AR-10.
Of course, this being a deserted island and all, the latter two wouldn't be able to function and I'd probably only have limited fuel for the Directo, but they're my favourites so it's better than nothing lmao
You know your interest is obscure when it throws Google for a loop:
Yeah, AI has absolutely no clue when it comes to sirens lmao. The Air Raid Sirens Wiki is where you want to go if you want to learn about sirens.
In Eve Online, when a capsule was destroyed, a frozen corpse was left behind.
I knew someone who would go around collecting corpses. A battle is going, he'd be out there scooping them up. He's running a hauler, and this was the day that when your ship got destroyed, every bit of loot went out in individual units, so when a pirate would try to shake him down he'd respond with "If you blow me up, you'll crash back to desktop."
That was how he played the game, gathering corpses.
This guy isn't a weird, he's straight up dangerous
This is EVE we're talking about. This is honestly one of the more benign if not weird habits.
This is the game where to join a corp you nearly needed a resume so people could make sure you weren't a spy because months to years infiltration processes happen in this game. Or just rampant piracy.
“If you blow me up, you’ll crash back to desktop.”
What does that mean?
The game would attempt to render the thousands of corpses all at once, which presumably would overload the game engine and cause it to crash.
He had so many individual pieces of loot on board, blowing up his ship would overload the players ram and crash the game.
Anvil firing
You get 2 anvils
Pack some gunpowder between them
Light a fuze
Run
The top one shoots off into the air
And you try not to looney tunes yourself.
Memorising door colours of every house and flat in a small Scottish town of about 30,000.
Yes, the hobby-ist was on the spectrum.
My friends grandpa ~~breads~~ breeds pigeons, he does nothing with them after tho.
Like this?
Oops
I dunno if it's really a hobby, but one time I heard about bug collectors. They're not people who go around catching insects, instead they're people who go around catching STDs. On purpose.
One time I was at a bonfire and a friend of a friend, looking like he was up all night, said he was up all night watching tornado siren videos on youtube
Siren enthusiast here, it's a surprisingly large community that's really started to blow up these past few years. There are so many models and sounds that there's always something interesting to find and I find them pleasant to listen to. Sirens are very powerful machines that move a ton of air, and they're capable of shaking the ground and rumbling your chest when you're near one. We have an annual Sirencon in Wisconsin every year where we bring our privately owned sirens (usually bought for cheap after they've been retired from service) and have a good time firing them up.
I personally enjoy learning the history of the sirens themselves and finding surviving units of rare historical models, especially those from between 1910-1950 when they were still trying to figure out what worked and what didn't. There was a ton of innovation and cool designs. A lot of people associate sirens with air raids, but their original primary purpose was to replace bells, air horns and whistles at fire departments that needed an audible signal to summon volunteer firefighters to the station upon a fire call. Being electric, the siren didn't need air pressure or steam which could run out, and couldn't be confused with church bells.
I stalk random people on the Internet
I like watching people on the internet. 15y ago, I was using Shareaza, Kazaa, Emule as my music sources. For those who aren't familiar with those software: it's p2p file download. You install Shareaza on your computer, and give access to specific folder to the Shareaza network. Anyone using Shareaza can then download the files located on your shared folder. But, in the mid 00', even more than today, people weren't that tech savy and what happened, way too often, was that a user would give access to the "My Documents" folder or even worse, their whole computer. I was looking for those thoses and I was reading their MSN messenger history, looking at their pictures, their resume, their schoolwork... I was really enjoying learning everything about their life through their My Documents folder.
Fast forward to 2018. All those p2p software disappeared. But I found an alternative: 4shared. 4shared allows you to upload pictures and share them (like img). When you download the app, you can setup the app to automatically upload all your pictures (from your phone). But a lot of users don't know that, and they end up with all they smartphone pictures on the net, with a public settings. I enjoy going to 4shared, looking for those non savy users, and learn everything about their lifes.
And I don't even need that. I have hobbies, friends, I don't have issues meeting women or people, but I like stalking on those strangers on 4shared.
I started photographing aquatic insects. Not really big into it but every once in a while, mostly spring time
Trainspotting (a now largely obsolete English hobby). Back when trains were a thing, nerds would gather at at the front end of the platform to write down the numbers of the engines. Exciting stuff. If you ever saw a movie called 'The Station Agent' with Peter Dinklage you kind of get the idea. Now a slang for a pointless, useless activity (which is where the movie about Scottish heroin addicts gets its name from).
A close second is commenting on the internet.
Back when I worked on a school boat we had a German kid in to cruise ship spotting. Every time we encountered a cruise ship he’d run to the chart house with his special notebook and write down all the AIS info and whatnot. We regularly saw what were in my opinion way cooler boats like tallships and navy warships but he didn’t care about anything else.
Japan still has a lot of campaigns with special prints or characters on trains. Fans find their schedules and wait at stations to take pictures. Its quite fun to ride one of those trains and see tens of ethusiasts at every stop.
I don't remember the name, but the being hanged by chains attached to your skin thing is really weird
That I've heard of? I'm gonna count that guy who commissioned fanart of women buying way too much Wonderbread and destroying rainforests.
Thinking about that guy, he's probably having the time of his life with AI image generators.
I met a worm farmer when delivering a package.
I had no idea that was a thing.
People buy earthworm and put it in their garden, it helps with the plant
Counting counties aka keeping track of every county you visit. My husband has this hobby, and sometimes on road trips we drive way out of the way for him to grab a new county.
Bryan Ropar has forgotten more about plastic chairs than you know about anything.
The fire alarm collecting community is larger than you might expect. I first got one recommended to me on New Year's of a guy setting off all 20 or so of his linked fire alarms when the clock struck midnight. He needed hearing protection the next room over.
Extreme Ironing
